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The Shostakovich Quartet: Andrey Shishlov (first violin), Sergey Pischugin (second violin),
Alexander Galkovsky (alto), Alexander Korchagin (cello), Alexey Kozlov (alto saxophone, soprano saxophone)

Alexey Kozlov and the Shostakovich String Quartet, Boheme Music, CDBMR 904054
Audio sample: NOCTURNE

    The Shostakovich Quartet was founded in 1976 and has gained international reputation after becoming prize winners of some prestigious competitions. Over 30 years of concerts and tours in 38 countries on 4 continents have brought it the world-wide fame. Along with giving concerts and touring, the Shostakovich Quartet takes part in studio work. In last years they recorded over 50 discs and compact discs for Olympia (Great Britain), Melodiya (Russia), Deutsche Grammophon (Germany), Ricordi (Italy), MPSL (USA), Toshiba EMI and Sacrambow (Japan).
Their repertoire includes 15 quartets by Dmitry Shostakovich, music by European classics as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, the Russian classics as Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Glazunov, Grechaninov, and also by 20th century innovators: Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The musicians of the Quartet have a wide range of interest and are competent in the most different spheres of musical culture, including modern jazz.
Alexey Kozlov is a saxophonist, composer, arranger, founder of the Russian jazz-rock and the leader of the Arsenal ensemble, Russia's first jazz rock band which exists since 1973. A.Kozlov is mentioned as a typical representative of musical underground of Stalin and Brezhnev time in a popular book by American journalist Hedrik Smith 'The Russians' (ch.8, 'Youth'). The name of Alexey Kozlov is entered in the Big Soviet Encyclopaedia (vol.8, 'Jazz'), in the Encyclopaedia of Music, and in some foreign jazz encyclopaedias and dictionaries. An article about him can be found in the annual 'The International Who's Who' (Europe Publications Ltd., London).

Alexey Kozlov and the Shostakovich String Quartet
Music presented on the new CD is a part of our joint program which came into being in the late 1996. It is characteristic that all pieces contain improvisations by myself and the members of the Quartet. The principle of improvisation was inherent in academic music from its very start, but towards the end of the 19th century the soloists stopped to improvise for some reason, maybe out of fear to intrude in the pieces by the composers who became classics. But at the beginning of our century a new kind of musical art based on improvisation appeared. It was called jazz. So, in our program we have made an attempt to bring improvisation back into classical pieces on the one hand, and to impart chamber, academic character to the classical jazz pieces on the other.

The participants of the project have met by chance at a reception in autumn of 1997. Alexey Kozlov has long nourished plans to make a program for saxophone and string instruments, and the musicians of the Quartet, though having typical classical education, were interested in jazz from their youth and collected discs and recordings. First rehearsals have already shown that they have no problems with swing and drive which remain an insurmountable barrier for many classical musicians.

The idea of this program is clear. It is an attempt to bring the principle of improvisation back to academic music on the one hand, and to introduce the aesthetics of chamber music to the performance of jazz on the other. Not all classical pieces can be reinterpreted, and it is not always possible or necessary to improvise. But in some pieces by the French impressionists and Russian composers of the late 19th - early 20th centuries there are harmonic outlines very close to modern jazz. Examples are presented on the CD. The recorded pieces comprise just a part of an extensive concert program of this, so to say, Quintet. According to Alexey Kozlov, the period of making arrangements for this program has proved very useful to him, due to valuable counsel of the experienced members of the Quartet, he had good schooling in instrumentation and mastered 'quartet composition'. He had another assistant: a computer with Cubase software which helped him to memorize scores, play them in real time, correct mistakes and print the notes. As a result of this work, Kozlov composed 'Forgiveness', a piece for quartet without saxophone, which is a variant of the composition of the same name performed by the Arsenal ensemble in the early 80s. It is the last piece on new CD.